this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

It's insane the amount of comments about him accepting and making these bribes while the entire government for the last 50 years has been bought and sold with lobbyists and business owners. It is like he is the only one and not the entire Congress is behind this behaviour..

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

You are right. But here's the key difference:

while the entire government for the last 50 years has been bought and sold with lobbyists and business owners

A President enriching others who support him (as opposed to "doing what's best for the nation" generally speaking), while still wrong, is not the same as personally enriching himself and this blatantly. The US has always been like this and many would have loved to do what Trump is doing, but didn't dare go this far and so recklessly. Trump is merely a product of his country, and it kind of surprises me it took this long for someone like him to get his paws directly on this kind of power.

Instead of being a businessman currying favor with the President, he skips the middle man entirely and becomes President himself, to his own personal benefit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

But hasn't it been the case in many things that Trump just does more and more boastfully what others were doing before more quietly and slickly?

I mean, look at the Israeli Genocide, were Biden was actively supporting Israel with guns and ammo (including sending 2000lb bombs which even the US Military won't use "because they have a too large collateral") but decorating it all with a bit of Theatre ("we're talking to Israel about a cease fire"), or how students were already being violently suppressed by the police under Biden when they demonstrated against the Genocide, or the immigrant thing were Biden was already imprisoning and deporting the most immigrants ever (even than Trump's first term) including separating children from their parents but it was all done much more quietly, or, as others pointed out, the Democrats having been on the take as much as the Republicans (who can forget Hilary Clinton getting paid half a million dollars for a couple of hours work to go give a speech to some Goldman Sachs' traders just before the election, something which probably contributed to her loss), or the giant civil society surveillance apparatus as revealed by Snowden built-up and supported by both Republican and Democrat presidents.

In these kinds of things Trump pumped up the volume and tore down the curtains hiding what's going on in the backstage, whilst not really changing the nature of what is being done significantly, just doing more of it and being loudly about it rather than using some florid language to claim to be doing the opposite as the previous ones did.

America had already been moving towards full-blown Fascism before Trump (personally I saw the giant civil society surveillance apparatus as a massive red flag, as that's the kind of thing that Authoritarian regimes have, not Democracies),